For the K-12 teachers among us, here is something
written by Lee Shulman* from a piece he contributed
to Common Schools, Uncomon Futures , Barry S. Kogan, ed., 1998.
"...What are people really doing when they teach? Or
when they meet a patient and make a diagnosis and
prescribe a treatment? What I have found in the years of
studying the women and men engaged in these
professions [medicine and teaching] is that, of the two,
teaching is by far the more complex and demanding. The
more time I spend in classrooms with teachers - talking
with them, observing, watching videotapes, talking some
more, reflecting on my own teaching - the more I peel off
layer upon layer of incredible complexity. After some 30
years of doing such work, I have concluded that
classroom teaching - particularly at the elementary and
secondary levels - is perhaps the most complex, most
challenging, and most demanding, subtle, nuanced, and
frightening activity that our species has ever invented. In
fact, when I compared the complexity of teaching with
that much more highly rewarded profession, "doing
medicine", I concluded that the only time medicine even
approaches the complexity of an average day of
classroom teaching is in an emergency room during a
natural disaster. When 30 patients want your attention at
the same time, only then do you approach the complexity
of the average classroom on the average day."
I'm always amazed when people think teaching is an easy
(*Shulman holds an endowed chair in Education,
Professor, at Stanford University, and works mainly in
